How long does it take to learn Toki Pona?

Nobody knows how long it takes to learn Toki Pona. Nobody knows how long it takes to become "fluent," "skilled," or "conversational" either. Nobody even knows how long it takes to learn all the words.

The community has been interested in this question for a long time, but no one has come up with any answer better than anecdotes. There is a notion that Toki Pona is "easier" to learn than natural languages, and even that it is the "easiest" language to learn. Odds are, neither of these can be tested, so they'll never be more than beliefs that some members of the community hold¹. There is not and has never been any evidence-supported answer to how long it takes to learn Toki Pona².

Well, until now.

You can learn Toki Pona in 10 study-hours, but

• "learn" means "become conversational in." It does not mean fluent.
• Those 10 hours are spread over 30 days. Breaks matter!
• There's only one source of evidence- but granted, that is better than no evidence!
• That evidence is the only learning method that these numbers are known to apply to³.

In January 2023, jan Telakoman published o pilin e toki pona, "Experience Toki Pona". It's a Toki Pona course made entirely of comprehensible input. He then asked prospective learners to take his 30 day challenge, where they would watch one of these videos every day for 30 days. At the end of the challenge, they'd hop on a call with jan Telakoman, discuss the challenge, and have a conversation in Toki Pona to put the course to the test.

Assuming participants follow the rules of the challenge, they will spend about 10 hours (20 minutes per video x 30 videos) studying Toki Pona over the course of 30 days. That's an excellent benchmark, and a very realistic timeline to become conversational in Toki Pona. So, has anyone done it?

Yes! This playlist, with 14 videos as of writing, documents those who took the 30 day challenge and then recorded a talk with jan Telakoman. All of these videos feature a purely Toki Pona conversation, and most of those conversations are over ten minutes long. These conversations do have their fair share of struggles, but each person does successfully hold a fairly long conversation with jan Telakoman. Or, put another way, they have achieved a conversational level of Toki Pona.

With this, we can confidently claim that it takes at least 10 hours over 30 days to become conversational in Toki Pona.

And this claim is much more apt- in addition to the evidence behind it, it portrays the process of learning in a more sincere way. You can't brute-force your way through the learning process by doing everything up front. You need time to rest between lessons, so everything you've learned can "lock in"⁴. Put another way, most people aren't going to get 30 hours better at playing the piano if those 30 hours of practice are spread over only 3 days. Time spent is only part of the puzzle- consistency is another.

But if you'd prefer a snappier version of the claim:

With 20 minutes a day over 30 days, you can be conversational in Toki Pona!

But wait- news organizations and research publications and youtubers have been claiming it takes 30 hours to learn Toki Pona since 2015, years before we had this evidence. They even claim a "general consensus among the community." What?

Where did "30 hours" come from?

The earliest source surprised me. The 30 hour claim does come from the community, but not so much from consensus.

jan Mato, an early member of the Toki Pona community⁵, posted this thread on January 11th 2011. In it, they ask everyone how many hours it took them to learn Toki Pona. The thread got five responses, and in the first of these, aikidave suggests the following figure for themselves:

I spent on average, about 45 minutes per day studying toki pona, so that means it took me about 30 hours to 'learn' toki pona.

Note: This quote portrays those 30 hours as study-hours, as in the amount of time you spend with your nose down to study. This is a huge contrast to the way those 30 hours are sold in various articles and videos today: 30 hours from introduction to fluency.

Continuing: jan Mato repeated this claim a few more times throughout 2011, and that was almost the end of it! The 30 hour claim never showed up on the forum again.

But in January 2015, The Guardian posted an article discussing a small group attempting to learn Toki Pona in 48 hours, led by Oliver Mayeux and Marta Krzeminska. This doesn't include the specific "30 hour" claim⁶- if anything, their article is an honest and realistic portrayal of what your first two days of learning Toki Pona could be like. But this article is important because it would be a turning point for Toki Pona itself: Toki Pona was starting to get more public attention.

Later, in July 2015, The Atlantic (*cough*) posted their own article about Toki Pona⁷. In it, they interview both Sonja Lang and Marta Krzeminska⁸- one of the organizers from the Guardian Article. Here, the author makes the 30 hour claim. With no citation.

a general consensus among Toki Pona speakers is that it takes about 30 hours to master.

And note, this quote doesn't qualify those 30 hours as "study-hours."

After this publication, other organizations and podcasts seem to have copied them. They include the unsupported 30 hour claim, and do not qualify the 30 hours as study-hours.

There isn't any further source, so the only things left to do are speculate and see how the community dealt with this information after the fact! I've packaged my speculation below to be skipped.

Speculation

Cynically, it's easy to believe that the author of the Atlantic article searched "how long does it take to learn toki pona" and found one of jan Mato's forum posts. The author is writing for a fairly prestigious publication, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were nervous about citing a random forum post. Instead, don't cite the source at all!

Alternatively, it could have been Marta Krzeminska. There isn't evidence to support this claim, but we are in speculation territory- "Marta" isn't terribly far from "Mato," and jan Mato was the source for the 30 hour claim on the forum. Uh, that's it for evidence, so this theory isn't looking good!

Update: jan Mata reached out, and is not jan Mato! And it's genuinely so cool that she did. I have such an appreciation for the community and how it can feel so large and so small all at once.

It could even have been Sonja Lang. As far as I'm aware, she has never made such a claim either before or since, but this Scoop Whoop article [warning: all the suggested articles are NSFW] does attribute the 30 hour claim to her. It is also the only one to do so.

Update: Sonja read this article and said the following:

Unless the author of the Atlantic article came forward to tell us, we'll likely never know how or why the 30 hour claim on the forum became a 30 hour claim in a professional news publication.

As for the community, they were not immune to uncritically repeating the 30 hour claim. Long after the Atlantic article was published, the 30 hour claim would re-appear in the community in 2016 and in 2021. Both times are differently uncertain, qualified with "or so I hear" and "IIRC I saw the figure ... somewhere."⁹

It's unclear what impact this misinformation has on Toki Pona. Some newcomers are drawn in by the claim, but there's no telling how many frustrated learners gave up and never came back because they couldn't understand any Toki Pona on their second day learning. There are also plenty of well-meaning learners who accidentally put down other learners.

I'd like to help this situation. To do that, let's pick apart what "30 hours" means- not just literally, but as it would be understood by those reading it too.

What does "30 hours" mean?

As I've alluded to, the claim that "You can learn Toki Pona in 30 hours!" is misleading. The challenge is in understanding how it's misleading. The truth is, there was never a single number that correctly described how long it takes to learn Toki Pona, or any language.

The first number is the amount of time you spend immersed in or studying the language, the "study-hours" I've referred to. For example, you'll often see claims that learning Japanese takes 100 hours, or 325-600 hours, or 3000-4800 hours, depending on what your goal is. This figure is generally given in hours.

The second number is how much time those study-hours are spread over. For example, you'll see claims that learning Japanese takes 6 months, or 1-2 years, or even sillier-sounding claims like "7 years" and "24 years." This figure is generally given in months or years, and is loosely linked to the study-hours figure by how many hours you spend studying per day.

But even understanding that the "30 hours" claim was missing context, there is still more missing context. The "30 hours" are study-hours, but what does "learn" mean? It could range from "knows the words" to "conversational" to "fluent," and even "fluency" can be understood differently from person to person. When the 30 hour claim was first made on the forum, "learn" was quoted to indicate its dubious meaning- "learn" could have meant "become conversational" or even as little as "make some sentences." Either way, these are wildly different from the "mastery" or "fluency" claim that appears in so many articles.

When the "30 hours" claim appears in various publications, especially after the Atlantic article, there doesn't seem to be any care taken for how the reader would interpret the claim. There is no context given for those 30 hours. The articles do not specify how long you might take to get through those 30 hours, and they provide either no understanding or a badly misinformed understanding of what you'll achieve by the end of those 30 hours.

This issue is made even worse by the fact that Toki Pona is a "small" language, or "minimalist" language, or "the world's smallest" language. These, while mostly accurate on their own, make the 30 hour claim even more misleading by adding legitimacy to the "30 hours to fluency" claim. If the language is so small, it makes perfect sense that you can learn it so fast! Except that isn't true at all.

It would have been more honest to say that those 30 hours were over the course of a few weeks or months, or at least that they were 30 hours of studying. But many publications let readers come away with the belief that "you can learn Toki Pona in 30 hours," where the reader will likely understand "30 hours" as "basically two days."

The only solution to this is to include all the context you can, every time you make this claim. At minimum:

• It takes at least 10 hours of study over 30 days, structured as 20 minutes per day.
• There's only one learning method, comprehensible input, that is known to work in that time frame.
• You'll only get to a "conversational" level of Toki Pona with this amount of time and effort.
• Your personal results could be different!

And if you must put flashy numbers on how long it takes to learn Toki Pona, "conversational in 10 hours over 30 days" or "20 minutes per day for 30 days to be conversational" is as good as it's going to get.